365 Days of Self Love

A year ago I wanted to die.

Or maybe a better way of saying it is that I was so overwhelmed with anxiety, stress, guilt, and tragic loss, that I wanted to alleviate the pain that I was being crushed under at every moment. Ending it all seemed like a potential solution. It would mean that I wouldn’t feel these horrible things anymore. All of my problems will disappear…

What saved me was holding onto the reality that this also a way of abandoning my family and loved ones, whose problems were very much so real. This minute long clip from the show The Blacklist explains this better than I can, and it’s a powerful piece of acting.

Suicide is a long-term and permanent solution to short-term and temporary problems.

Ending it all also doesn’t just mean preventing a future of negative experiences, it means preventing a future of positive experiences as well.

It comes down to a choice between committing to life or committing to death.

I committed to life.

2016: The Year of Post-Traumatic Growth

Post-traumatic growth: positive psychological change as the result of adversity and other challenges in order to rise to a higher level of functioning. Posttraumatic growth is not about returning to the same as it was previously experienced before a period of traumatic suffering, but rather it is about undergoing significant “life-changing” psychological shifts in thinking and relating to the world that is deeply meaningful.

Talk about starting a year off on the wrong foot.

I started 2016 barely able to breathe. Living at home and frequently losing sleep in a dysfunctional environment with two family members experiencing mental illness episodes, six months of working myself into the ground for a manipulative mentor, and living on a diet of frozen pizzas, my body burnt out. I had ignored my emotions and body for so long that my hormones went on strike, and I was unable to function. I was like a phone plugged in but that only ever charges to 20 percent. I could do little except sleep and lay down without getting out of breath.

When you endure long periods of sustained stress, it takes a toll on your adrenals. When stress persists, this can lead to the condition I experienced, called adrenal fatigue, which can be debilitating to your daily life until you recover.

Stress is the number one killer.

My body didn’t just burn out, but it burnt out at the worst possible time.

In the horrifying climax of a long-term mental episode, my mom was hit by a car and was in a coma. The trauma center became our second home, meanwhile I had inherited the entire load of housework, caring for two dog and my teenage brother (who at the time, was having an episode himself), trying to be strong for my dad, and not to mention needing to address the unhealthy number of cats at home that were peeing on everything.

I needed to heal so I could get everything under control, and I needed to do it fast.

I needed to relax and heal my body.
I needed to relax and heal my mind.
I needed to relax and heal my soul.
I needed to relax.

Relaxing, being a concept that had been so foreign to me.

Letting Go

Starting 2016, I had so many breakdowns. I have never experienced that much fear, desperation, and stress in my life. You reach a certain point where your emotions take control of your physical body, and before you know it, you’re on the floor screaming and hyperventilating. When you ignore and suppress your emotions for so long, eventually they find a way out in spite of you, and when they do, trust me, it isn’t pretty.

I had a choice to make. I could let this experience break me, or I could allow it to transform me.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

I could only survive this if I accepted one thing: What I had been doing up until this point wasn’t working.

Accepting that you have been wrong is the first and hardest step. It’s time to swallow your pride, let go of past regrets, and put your fundamental beliefs under a microscope and on trial. No beliefs are safe or sacred. If a belief leads to negative experiences, then you have an obligation to cut it out. Your beliefs are the foundation you build your life on, so replace anything that isn’t solid.

Holding onto a bad belief is like clinging to what you think is a life preserver, but it’s an anchor. You start drowning, but you don’t understand, so you cling tighter. Enough fighting and you eventually learn that the only thing you can do is let go.

Holding Emotions Hostage

The anchor I had to let go of was the way I valued logic over my emotions. I made decisions based on what made sense, especially if others validated them, regardless of how I felt about them.

I desired success, and the security and acceptance that would come with it. I held my emotions hostage for this goal.

My desperation would pump myself up for work that was draining and justify working with people I didn’t trust. I ended up taking out my pent up emotions on those closest to me and became a person I didn’t recognize.

It was only when I stopped suppressing my emotions that all of the negativity that I had been fearing was able to flood out of me. After the chaos, I was left free to experience inner peace. I realized that if I could learn to make my happiness in the present moment my new goal, to give myself the permission to be happy, and to give myself the approval that I desperately longed for, then I would change the course of my future from one of more sacrifice and pain, to one of joy, no matter where it led.

I used to set a goal and then develop destructive tunnel vision in doing anything I could, sacrificing anything I could, in order to realize that goal. I had to accept that this was not working. I was holding onto things so tightly that they were slipping through my fingers, so I opted instead to let go entirely. I worked to give myself the permission to be happy no matter outside circumstances.

I started asking myself, “How am I feeling” and learning how to interpret the answers.

We always make decisions based on emotions.

The only reason you do anything is because you think it’ll make you feel better. There is an inescapable emotional cause of every action.

You eat so you don’t feel hungry. You work so you can relax about your survival needs. Breathing feels better than holding your breath indefinitely.

We always make decisions based on emotions, even when we tell ourselves otherwise. When we set priorities based on “logic” while ignoring how we feel, we are still acting based on emotion, just in this case the emotion we are acting on is fear. Building up to 2016, all of my actions were based in fear.

Running away from how you feel is like trying to outrun your shadow. Your feelings are here to stay no matter how exhausted you get. Realizing this, you have two options: keep suppressing your emotions out of fear and commit to a life of misery, or recognize the value within all negative emotion. See them as little nudges showing you when changes need to be made along your journey. Ignore these little nudges, and you risk losing control to them, and you might need a counselor to help you work through them.

Embrace your negative emotions because they exist to show us what needs to change.

Your emotions are your life’s compass here to help you navigate.

Fear Blocks Feeling

The truth is, most people are afraid to listen to their emotions.

How often do we needlessly hold our emotions hostage out of fear–suppressing feelings so we can fulfill other people’s expectations for us–trying to achieve a desired result that we tell ourselves will be worth the sacrifice in the long run?

In this instance, we’re still making decisions because we think they’ll make us feel better, just instead of taking actions that will directly lead to happiness, we go about it in a roundabout way. We try to achieve indirect happiness, setting out to fulfill the expectations that others have set for us, thinking that winning their approval will lead us to the happiness we seek. We act out of fear of losing their love.

Where does this fear come from?

As we grow up and are socially conditioned, we build habits that make us doubt our emotions and act based on what authority figures decide instead. In the school system, fear is routinely used in its reward and punishment system. We are rewarded for developing reflexive and unquestioning obedience to authority, and punished whenever we question authority or try to exercise our own decision-making power instead.

Children are never out of touch with how they feel. Adults almost always are.

Young children don’t suppress or misinterpret their emotions. They regularly do what feels good in the present moment by playing with what interests them. They freely express their emotions, whether it is a welcome form of expression, like laughing, or an unwelcome form, like crying or throwing temper tantrums.

Growing up, we learn to doubt our emotions as a survival mechanism. To any dependent child, the key to continued survival is adult approval, and abandonment means death. At a young age, the stakes are high to keep the adults in our lives happy.

We are more or less compliant to obey authority over our emotions until adolescence. At that point we are dying to start making decisions for ourselves. To society, this is seen as teenage rebellion, but teenagers only rebel in destructive ways when not given the freedom to exercise their judgement like any other muscle.

From here, teens either venture down a self-destructive path, where they value the opinions of people that their parents don’t approve of, like gang leaders, or they decide to color within the lines. There they only make decisions that they know the adults in their lives will approve of, even if it means living a lie. Either path is a death: the first being a material one, the second being a spiritual one.

We get conditioned to value the opinion of others over how we feel. Deeper than that, we get conditioned into believing that making the authority figures in our life happy is the key to our happiness.

Either way, growing up without regular opportunities to interpret your emotions and to use this compass to guide your life, and the compass gets rusty.

In order for you to see the true value of your emotions, you need to use them to make decisions. The key to an amazing life is a strong connection to your emotions. This only comes with practice and it can atrophy like any muscle: You use it, or lose it!

You can only meet your emotions with love if you release the fear blocking its path, and all fears, no matter how complex, are rooted in the fear of losing love.

The Foreign Concept of Self-Love

If all fears are rooted in fear of losing love, then how can you release all fear and open a strong dialog with your emotions once and for all?

This is where the beautiful concept of self-love comes in.

I first came across the concept of self-love while I was wallowing in self-hate, hating myself for a number of reasons, most of all, impatience with my professional growth. Like light and dark, one cannot exist without the other, and self-love cannot exist without self-hate.

Meeting Yourself

In order to start a dialog with your emotions, you’re going to need to want to have a good relationship with yourself in the first place.

The relationship you have with yourself is the most important relationship of your life.

It becomes the foundation for everything else.

It might sound strange, but how is your relationship with yourself? Would you call it healthy, supportive, and nurturing… or unhealthy, embedded with criticisms, neglect, and misunderstandings? When you look in the mirror, what thoughts do you think about yourself?

Reflect on where you currently stand with yourself.

Why is self-love so hard?

When your desire and ability to understand your emotions becomes eroded, as does your ability to love yourself. It’s hard to give yourself what you want when you truly don’t know what that is.

Firstly

Self-love is difficult, firstly because we grow up learning how to love others unconditionally, while we only learn to love ourselves conditionally. While we learn to love others in spite of temporary mistakes, we learn that love is only given to us if we meet certain requirements.

“I love you, but only when you get good grades.”
“I love you, but only if you lost weight.”
“I love you, but only [fill in the blank].”

These statements get embedded in our psyche, and become the weapons that we beat ourselves up with.

The concept of self-love is what brings attention to the destructive voice that may have taken residence in your head. This voice may call you stupid, fat, lazy, etc. In working to love yourself, you ask yourself: Would I say half the statements I say to myself to a friend?

Secondly

Self-love is difficult because we learn that to love yourself is selfish and will lead to you being a bad person. Fearful of being considered selfish and unworthy of love, we instead do what we learn is good, which is to be selfless, and that means putting the happiness of others above our own.

This is a destructive choice because it’s not possible to act from a place of either pure selflessness or pure selfishness. One is destructive to others, while the other is destructive to self. You need a balance of both giving and getting in order to live prosperously.

Consider the kinds of people who are stubborn about doing the work they are passionate about. These kinds of people end up doing better work because of their passion, but they had to be selfish in order to stick with and share their passion with the world. In the end, the world is grateful for their authenticity.

Think of the word selfless.

Self-less.

Without self.

The self is the very thing you should never be without.

Your self is the very thing that you should never sacrifice.

How you can make peace with these conflicting beliefs is to understand that if you try giving to others without first giving to yourself, you will have nothing to give. You need to fill up your own cup first, but once you do, soon the water spills over, meaning that now you have much more available for effortlessly giving.

Thirdly

We lose touch with our emotions for fear of becoming irrational. This fear is unfounded, because emotions and logic don’t have to be at odds with each other, but can instead be used to verify each other. You can, and should, make decisions that satisfy both your head and your heart. Listening to your emotions isn’t irrational, it’s a rational way of prioritizing your happiness first.

People who are happy prioritize how they feel. This makes them less likely to burn themselves out, and leads them to producing much better work. Contrary to what fear-based ideologies condition us to believe, the more that people place top priority on their individual happiness, the better it is for everybody in the long run.

For more in depth work with self-love, I highly recommend this video and the book Shadows Before Dawn.

Tuning into Your Self

How are you feeling?

When you ask yourself this, do you get a clear answer?

When I started the journey of self-love and listening to my emotions, I was surprised at how difficult it was… Communicating with my heart felt like trying to interpret weak radio signals in another language. In the beginning it was almost impossible, but with persistence and time, I started getting better at understanding what my heart was telling me.

Feelings = Thoughts

All feelings come from thoughts. Positive thoughts lead to positive emotions, negative thoughts lead to negative emotions. When you have a negative emotion, but aren’t sure why, patiently follow it to its root of a negative thought. Like any weed, these need to be pulled out.

You can change your emotions by changing your thoughts.

If you struggle with reoccurring negative thoughts, then that is caused by a belief. Beliefs are just thoughts that have become so automatic that you are barely conscious of them anymore. With conscious effort and patience, you can change negative and limiting beliefs, which I encourage you to do. You have an obligation to yourself to change any beliefs you have that don’t serve you.

Stress may be the number one killer, but what is stress but negative emotion? What is negative emotion but an outspoken negative thought within us that we haven’t acknowledged?

The Year-Long Experiment

Understanding the importance of emotions and self-love is one thing. Applying it, however…

Being at my breaking point in 2016, I didn’t have anything to lose, so when I stumbled upon the 365 Days of Self-Love experiment in Shadows Before Dawn, I latched onto it for dear life.

The challenge is simple. For 365 days, live your life by this question:

“What would somebody who loved themselves do?”

For an entire year, I let the answers to this question be the guiding factor in my life, no matter how significant of a crossroads I was at. I asked it when making decisions like what to eat, but also bigger decisions, like where to direct my productive focus.

The answers to this question usually come easily. It’s putting the answers into action that is the challenging part. It meant prioritizing my happiness in the present moment over all else in my life, even the expectations of others. If you do the challenge yourself, it might mean changing the dynamics of your relationships, or letting go of some relationships entirely. It certainly did for me.

Results

When I started this challenge, I had no idea what I was getting into to. I thought for sure that the whole year would’ve ended up being a waste of time where I just did fun things without learning or getting any work done. After all, how can you expect to get any work done without the risk of a whip cracking on your back?

To my pleasant surprise, after having practiced self-love for a year, I can say it was the best decision I have ever made, and I am never going back.

Living by this question has brought me such tremendous happiness and growth that it has become impossible for me to live any other way. Sometimes I slip up and will fall back into old thought habits that will make me feel negative, but eventually, I always relearn these lessons and come back to living by “What would somebody who loved themselves do” with joy.

I can conclude the year saying that the results were incredible. Despite all of the trauma I’ve been through, this was still an amazing year for me during which I transformed much of how I live and how I see the world.

I stabilized what used to be an unhealthy household. I helped my brother learn how to manage his mental illness and taught him life skills. I went from living off of processed food to going vegan with a diet mostly of fresh produce. I read 15 books. I met amazing people that I’m honored to call my friends and collaboration partners. I dramatically changed my spiritual and political beliefs.

I got out of my shell and took acting classes, dramatically improved my ability to draw the human form–the lessons from which I can apply to rapid growth for any skill, started playing the ukulele, and made progress in learning the disciplines of both video and web animation.

There are many lessons from the year that I will share in upcoming posts.

In summary, I have learned:

• Your emotions are the compass guiding your life.
• Positive emotions are your indication that you are doing the right things.
• Negative emotions are your indication that you need to change something, whether that means changing the outside environment by taking action, or changing your inner environment by changing your thoughts.

These lessons are so ridiculously simple that I’m surprised I ever got conditioned to live otherwise.

I dare you

Be kind to yourself. Explore the concept of self-love, and start living by the question, “What would somebody who loves themselves do?”

What do you have to lose?